


Black metal

by Angelcide



Series: Silicon Dreams, and Ghosts in the Machine [1]
Category: Tron - All Media Types, Tron: Evolution
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-06
Updated: 2012-04-06
Packaged: 2017-11-03 03:44:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Angelcide/pseuds/Angelcide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If programs dream of electric sheep, what do their nightmares consist of?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black metal

**Author's Note:**

> I have written drabbles, and things for many years, yet this is the first time I've ever posted them to a public forum ( as opposed to sharing with a few fandom friends ) so please be gentle? I'm not a writer, and I have no illusions about holding a candle to the awesome work I have seen, and am still seeing be produced by this fandom. 
> 
> Also, the Sandman quote in the beginning is intended to become the first in a series of drabbles inspired by similar Sandman quotes. No deadlines, but I will attempt to get more up as soon as life, and commitments allow me to.

_A dark mirror. Imagine that you woke in the night and rose, and seemed to see before you another person whom you slowly perceived to be yourself. Someone had entered in the night and placed a mirror in your sleeping place, made from a black metal. You had been frightened only of your reflection. But then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own stayed still....A dark mirror....That was always the intention....  
\- Dream “The Kindly Ones”_

Jalen didn’t like rest cycles anymore.  
He hadn’t minded them, once. He had rested, processor running it’s light defrag, sorting all the stray bits of images, text, sound, and all sensory input into the most interesting arrangements. If programs can be said to dream, Jalen once thinks he did do that. He had _Dreams_.

He doesn’t anymore.

He resists rest. Resists it until he’s running on near-burnout, and someone else; some well-meaning program, or User, some friend will insist he go for at least a short bit of ‘rest’, and recharge. He doesn’t like it, because it’s only during these half-aware moments when his processor used to come up with the most impossible schematics that the _other one_ comes. Or maybe, Jalen supposed, he only noticed then? He tried to keep the other one out. The strange, dark program that hovered in the wings of awareness through waking, and through rest. Jalen had first spent his time trying not to see that one. Trying to look away.

It does not last. Time passes ( how much? How long this time? ) but he always comes back to this same place. The same dark program. In the phantom light that comes from nowhere, Jalen shines. He is himself. Tall, and hale…and so afraid. Because as the dark program waits, ever patient, in the secret places of his subconscious. It waits, and it watches, and Jalen _knows_. He knows that it is trying to tell him something. 

Something terrible. Something he does not want to hear. Something he never wanted to hear, or know, or suspect out of anyone. None of the smiling faces around him, or the somber ISO’s who greet him with guarded hope. The dark program knows. He has been trying to tell Jalen for a long time, Jalen thinks. 

Until one down cycle, Jalen feels…less afraid. The dark program has never come without invitation, never forced the secret on him. He could not ignore it forever, either. Somehow, he knew that with as much certainty as he knew the pattern of his own circuits. The secret, the program, they were important. And so, Jalen suppresses the fear. He does not flee from the half-glimpsed presence. Not this time.

This time, he is white, and shining, and fearless. This time, he must face his fear, because that was the only way to move past it.  
And when the dark program comes, it is with nothing between them save a pane of glass, a hard thought, one decision; nothing at all. The dark program illuminates from the covered, black mask down. Yellow, and covered in cracked, seething circuits; all sharp edges, anger written in every line of shell, form, and function. But it is silent. It waits.

 _”Tell me.”_  
Jalen speaks without speaking. Talking without use of text, or tongue. His meaning is taken with perfect clarity all the same.  
 _”I…I have to know. You have to tell me why!”_

 

And in glitching, pixelated shards peeling from the center of the mask outward in halting, decaying fragments, the black, blank mirror is gone. In place is Jalen’s own face. His own, but with eyes that burn him with their regard. Their unflinching hatred for him, for everything he was made up of. Hatred, but a quiet, tired resignation under it. A broken thing, a cracked mirror, all so horribly distorted, and in no way more so by the terror gripping Jalen so tightly he could not force his feet to move.

The voice that is no voice at all answers anyway. It is cold, so very cold, and the weight of a hundred thousand cycles makes every syllable strain with ache under it. 

**_”Because everyone lies. To spare the pain of truth, to hide the pain of betrayal, to deny what they can not see.  
Everyone. Everywhere. Lies.”_ **


End file.
